June 23, 2003

Ebay:Enron for 2004?

whitman.jpg
Whitman: How Much Would You Bid?
CBS News | eBay's Bid For Success | June 12, 2003 15:53:46

eBay. Yes, good, old eBay. Your own personal eBay.  You've found and snagged those Trolls you had as a kid. You've gotten rid of all that junk you've been moving from house to house for a decade at a premium. You've nailed that stuffed Jackalope for only $468. Great. Now kick the habit and get clean before your are really addicted.

As more and more people are finding out, the web auction monolith built on "trust" currently only trusts the sellers to keep kicking coins into its bloated coffers. Buyers are left to the not so tender mercies of one of the largest and most rapidly growing centers of online fraud in the Infosphere.

Could eBay clean it up? Yup. Will they? Only if their stock price starts to auger into the ground.

EBay began to drift down in overall dependability about the time it hired the

infamous Meg Whitman to "take it to a higher level." Whether this is the cause of the effect remains unknown. The result, however, is a site where dubious offers and web addiction can be found in equal measure.

As one female "user" states about her ebay chat room use: "We spend more time together on the boards than I do with my family." Probably a good thing too.

Not such a good thing is the fictional story ebay founder Pierre Omidyar is currently telling himself. In a recent interview Omidyar stated: "I sat down, frankly, over Labor Day weekend 1995, after having kind of thought about these issues for a couple of months, and I just whipped up some code. By Monday afternoon, Labor Day, I had the site up."

Yup, Omidyar just did it all himself with his killer app: 'That_Little_Old_Codemaker_Me.exe' Left out of this gargantuan bit of self-inflation are all those little people that actually took eBay from a Pez Dispensers For Sale site to a global hegemon with all the ethics you've come to expect from an online Enron. The word, according to the article above, is that eBay is coming under the government's scrutiny.

Will that force eBay clean out their cluttered attic? About as soon as you'll see Pierre putting Meg up for bid. With no reserve.

Posted by Van der Leun at June 23, 2003 11:18 PM
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